How the Post Office Created America

by Winifred Gallagher

  ONCE THE CONSTRAINTS IMPOSED by the Revolution had lifted, the demand for better means of travel exploded along with the mail volume, which caused many post riders to lead a second horse burdened with overflowing, often soggy mailbags. Both transportation and the post were still largely limited to the East, along the major North−South axis from Maine to Georgia, but the new, technologically advanced stagecoach at least allowed more people and mail to be carried there much more reliably than by horse or canoe. These modern, enclosed carriages, recently perfected in Britain, were drawn by two to six horses along set routes at set times, periodically stopping at “stages,” or relay stations, where passengers could rest while the teams were changed.

  America’s wretched roads had practically ruled out the use of carriages well into the eighteenth century, particularly in the countryside. Most wheeled vehicles had been rough, open carts or wagons whose passengers, seated on straw, bounced along on dirt lanes that were little more than granitic ruts and often impassible in wet or frozen weather. By 1761, however, John Stavers, a resourceful innkeeper from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, was among the first entrepreneurs to grasp that transportation’s future lay with the stagecoach. He advertised a “large stage chair, with two good horses well equipped,” that would carry four persons from his inn to Ipswich, Massachusetts, where they would spend the night before proceeding to the Charlestown ferry and on to Boston. His enterprise attracted the attention of Hugh Finlay, the Crown’s postal inspector, who observed that Stavers’s drivers, who illegally transported letters for a fee, were “so artful that the postmaster cou’d not detect them.” This sensible bureaucrat decided that it was “proper to take this man into the pay of the office . . . because the mails brought by the Stage Coach did rather more than pay the 10 pounds of Staver’s [sic] yearly salary.”

  Travelers soon took to the high-tech stagecoach, which would play a vital role in American life for much of the nineteenth century. Compared with the wagon, it offered more protection from the elements and highwaymen, and its “shock absorbers,” in the form of leather strapping, gave a more comfortable ride. The coach also functioned better in poor weather and darkness and thus was more predictable. Passengers leaving Boston on Monday morning could reasonably plan, barring blizzard or flood, on reaching New York City by Saturday night, and far more easily and safely than Madam Knight had managed astride her horse. Stagecoach lines soon sprang up to connect important cities, followed by local branches radiating from these hubs.

  In 1785, barely two years after the Revolution ended, the post made the first of its greatly underappreciated contributions to America’s transportation network by subsidizing stagecoaches to carry the mail, starting on certain major routes. The coaches were slower and much more expensive than the post riders, but they could carry much more mail, particularly the bulky newspapers, and do so more securely and dependably. Moreover, as Congressman Charles Pinckney of South Carolina emphasized, the government’s investment improved both mail service and transportation by encouraging “the establishment of stages to make intercourse between different parts of the Union less difficult and expensive.”

  Postmaster General Ebenezer Hazard, who succeeded Richard Bache, Franklin’s lackluster son-in-law, in 1782, seemed like the ideal executive to navigate the major technological transition from post rider to stagecoach. He was an experienced bureaucrat who had worked first for the Constitutional Post in New York City, then as a postmaster during the Revolution. Hazard was also a publisher, a scholar who had collaborated on a Greek translation of the New Testament, and a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. A humanitarian, he expressed his deep concern about the fate of Native Americans in an 1816 essay entitled “Remarks on Mr. Schermerhorn’s Report Concerning the Western Indians” and also belonged to the New York Society for Promoting the Manumission of Slaves, and Protecting Such of Them as Have Been, or May Be Liberated. History was a particular passion, and Hazard had used his travels during an earlier stint as the post’s surveyor general to gather rare materials that documented the republic’s founding, which were later published in his two-volume Historical Collections; Consisting of State Papers and Other Authentic Documents; Intended as Materials for an History of the United States of America. (More volumes had been planned, but poor sales ended the project.)

  Hazard threw himself into what was already one of the federal government’s most demanding jobs. His small staff in the capital (then still Philadelphia) was charged with everything from the oversight of postal finances in an era of pen-and-ledger accounting to returning undeliverable valuables to their senders. In addition, Hazard reorganized the department and its already characteristic plethora of rules and regulations. He also restricted mail censorship to wartime or when specifically ordered by certain high officials, adjusted postage rates, and improved the erratic service that had caused cracks about “hazarding a letter.”

  Hazard was a former businessman, and he was also determined to run his department as a profitable enterprise. In 1782, the Congress of the Confederation, which governed the United States between March 1781 and March 1789, had strengthened his hand by restricting to the post the “carrying and delivering of any letters, packets or other despatches from any place within these United States.” This reinforcement of its tacit monopoly on transporting letters for payment, which Great Britain had previously imposed on the Crown’s colonial mail, prevented private carriers from snatching up the most cost-effective, lucrative routes. Without protection, the post would have been left scrambling to provide mail service at uniform rates to all parts of the country, including the unprofitable remote areas.

  Like his six successors, Hazard achieved what would become the nearly impossible dream of future postmasters general: making the post support itself, and even run a surplus. Despite his many accomplishments, however, he was the first to battle with the combative transportation contractors on which the post depended. He complained that the stagecoach proprietors illegally carried private letters on the sly—indeed, he sued one man for doing so—missed connections between mail coaches, and were even known to speed up slow trips by leaving heavy mailbags behind. Worse, they routinely tweaked the mail coaches’ schedules to please their passengers, who liked to depart in the morning and arrive in the evening—the opposite of the timing preferred by the post’s lucrative business customers.

  The highly principled, devoutly Presbyterian Hazard was outraged by the crafty proprietors’ unpatriotic duplicity. If the post were to subsidize the stage system, he reasoned, the department had the right to make the rules and set the schedules for mail coaches. He also maintained that unlike the post riders, the proprietors also made money from carrying passengers and freight, and thus should charge the post less for their services. The independent, entrepreneurial stagecoach owners, however, were just as determined to maximize their profits at their federal patron’s expense, and they loudly protested the postmaster general’s assertions.

  Hazard was a poor politician by his own admission, and he failed to grasp the importance of the post’s relationship with the transportation industry and publishing—another emerging special interest, already antagonized by the limits he had imposed on the circulation of bulky newspapers in order to save money. The inevitable crisis occurred in 1788, when Hazard returned the major mail route between Boston and New York to the post riders. The ferocious labor-management dispute that ensued disrupted newspaper delivery at the very moment when Americans were desperate for the latest reports regarding the new Constitution’s ratification.

  The postmaster general had acted on the assumption that a country of avid newspaper readers cared more for businesslike principles than for timely information, but his tough ploy backfired. The public was infuriated, and so was Washington, the incoming president. He feared that interference with newspaper delivery at such a sensitive time would strike some as a dirty trick by the Federalists, and he expressed his annoyance in a letter to J
ohn Jay: “It is extremely to be lamented, that a new arrangement in the post office, unfavorable to the circulation of intelligence, should have taken place at the instant when the momentous question of a general government was to come before the people.”

  Criticized, overworked, and underpaid—another major grievance—Hazard took refuge in an early retirement in 1789. Despite his travails, he left behind a more secure, efficient department and a network that had expanded upon Franklin’s old North−South coastal axis with more East−West routes into the rapidly developing interior, including Pittsburgh, the gateway to the western towns along the Ohio River.

  The stagecoach proprietors were the first of a long progression of transportation contractors to exasperate postmasters general. Joseph Habersham, a Georgian who served presidents Washington, John Adams, and briefly Thomas Jefferson, became so fed up with some proprietors’ shoddy performance that he started a government-run mail coach line between Philadelphia and Baltimore. This service, which ran from 1799 to 1818, operated so well that Congress actually considered expanding it from Maine to Georgia before abandoning the idea as too ambitious and competitive with private industry—an increasing concern. In 1802, Gideon Granger, Habersham’s successor, became the first postmaster general to pay more for a route’s stage service than its revenue could cover, which reified the principle of using profits from populous regions to expand and support service in underdeveloped ones. (For a sense of just how lucrative letter postage could be: sending a two-page letter from Ohio to Virginia cost fifty cents in 1815, which is more in both real and cost-adjusted terms than the cost of mailing a one-ounce letter from Hawaii all the way to Alaska in 2015.)

  American history has slighted the importance of the post riders who carried the overland mail for more than a century and the stagecoaches that succeeded them. From before Washington’s presidency through Martin Van Buren’s, the coaches dominated America’s roads in the East, and they prevailed much longer in the wilder West. Without the government subsidization that accounted for a third to a half of the industry’s revenue, this vital transportation network could not have expanded into the remote places that no private, profit-driven enterprise would have invested in—a crucial factor in developing the highways, crossroads, and settlements that turned a wilderness into the United States.

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  THE SHEER SPEED OF the post’s growth during the Early Republic is hard to comprehend. Before the Post Office Act of 1792 was signed, mail was transported from Maine to Virginia just three times a week; south of Virginia, only once a week in winter, twice in summer. There were no postal facilities at all west of Pittsburgh and Albany. That same year, however, the department began its ambitious expansion, particularly into the underserved West and South. By 1810, America had 2,300 post offices and 36,000 miles of post roads; by 1830, approximately 8,400 and 115,000.

  The post’s development in Ohio, which was initially part of the wild and woolly Northwest Territory, suggests the challenges of extending the network into a frontier. The ranks of its adventurous pioneers, who numbered just 45,000 in 1800 but almost 938,000 by 1830, included East Coast farmers already looking for greener pastures; François D’Hébécourt, a French former classmate of Napoleon’s and postmaster of tiny Gallipolis, on the Ohio River; and Rufus Putnam, a Revolutionary War general who set out to make a fortune as a real estate developer. Postal service was essential to the expansionist dreams he shared with his enterprising partners in the Ohio Company of Associates. They purchased a million and a half acres of the Northwest Territory and, in 1788, established its first U.S. settlement at Marietta. The settlers who ventured there wanted to maintain connections with the East Coast and also to replicate it as fast as possible. (One of their first projects was building a fort, called the Campus Martius, to protect themselves from the understandably aggrieved Native Americans they sought to displace.) Marietta got a post office in 1794, but by the time of statehood in 1803, it was one of just eighteen in all of sprawling Ohio.

  Delivering a letter from the East Coast to Ohio required heroic efforts from the post. In 1800, Postmaster General Habersham inaugurated the “hub and spoke” circulation system, in which large, centralized “distributing post offices” sorted an entire region’s mail, then dispersed it to the spokes, or local “common” post offices, where the recipients retrieved it. Most of the new state’s postal facilities were strung along the great Ohio River or its tributaries, which were the best means of transportation in wild terrain and the inspirations for its early “river roads.” A letter sent from Philadelphia, say, to Cincinnati was forwarded to the big distributing post office at Pittsburgh, then traveled west by canoe or boat on the watery superhighway of the Ohio to its destination; outgoing mail went against the river’s current and took twice as long. The complexity of scheduling such aquatic service comes across in a notice announcing that a boat carrying the mail would leave Marietta “every Monday morning at five o’clock, or the evening before, if She chuses,” reaching Wheeling “the next Wednesday Evening unless a very extreordinary [sic] Fresh in the river shall render it empracticable [sic] which will very seldom if ever happen.”

  Ohio’s increased development and need for better communications with the outside world soon required decent overland transportation as well. Its first “highway” was aptly called Zane’s Trace, because initially that’s all it was. This glorified trail for horseback riders was hacked through the wilderness by Colonel Ebenezer Zane and his sons, who didn’t bother to ask Congress’s permission until 1796, after they had already begun the task. The road proceeded through the towns of Wheeling, Zanesville, and beyond Chillicothe to reach the Ohio River opposite Limestone, Kentucky; travelers had the option of paying for the Zanes’ ferry services where desirable. In 1803, the new state widened the trace to twenty feet and built the bridges necessary to accommodate wagon traffic.

  The shortage of good roads meant that Ohio’s overland mail had to be transported by old-fashioned post riders long after stagecoaches had taken over much of the job in the settled East. These intrepid couriers were cut from the same rugged cloth as the Zanes and the explorers and pioneers who would keep pushing America’s boundaries westward. One job description for the position ordered that “in the selection of riders you must always take persons of integrity, sound health, firmness, perseverance and high ambition, and pride of character. Among these a preference is due to young men, the less the size the better.” One such was James S. Totten, fourteen, who took the job when General David Sutton, his grandfather and guardian, died and left him penniless. The plucky, jockey-weight boy supported himself on his weekly route’s eight-dollar monthly salary and later become a prominent local politician.

  Despite Ohio’s impenetrable woods and rushing rivers, the mail had to be delivered with all possible speed. Post riders carried lanterns for traveling in darkness and were allowed no more than twenty minutes for breakfast and thirty for dinner. The territory’s first regular overland route was contracted in 1798 to a Daniel Convers, who was obliged to pay a stiff one-dollar fine for every hour’s delay in a scheduled delivery. By 1809, the mere approach of post rider John DePue (“a small, thin, wiry man”) blowing his horn brought things to a standstill, according to one account: “All teams and vehicles were prompt to give way, the carrier equally prompt to claim it. The United States mail must not be obstructed or delayed for a moment.”

  Ohio’s postal network grew quickly despite the many and various challenges. In 1810, the seemingly amphibious Samuel Lewis, who carried the mail between Cincinnati and Chillicothe, was badly delayed after being struck in the head by a floating log when swimming across a stream while leading his horse. Another post rider was treed by a pack of wild hogs, shot a particularly aggressive boar, then proceeded on, although regrettably a bit late. Still another escaped from an Indian attack just a mile from Fort Meigs, but finding a replacement after he quit proved difficult. Even the armed crews of the mail bo
ats that plied the Ohio stuck to midriver to avoid attacks from hostile tribes. Nevertheless, the number of the state’s post offices—a good gauge of development—grew from 90 in 1810 to 301 in 1820, to 692 by 1830, and to 1,224 in 1840 before slowing down.

  Not all parts of the rapidly expanding United States and its communications system grew at Ohio’s breakneck pace, particularly in the rural South. Post riders struggled to get the mail from Georgia to New Orleans on a yard-wide Indian trail through swamps and streams spanned only by fallen logs. In 1815, the news that General Andrew Jackson had vanquished the British in the Battle of New Orleans, albeit after the war had officially ended, took almost a month to reach New York City. Despite the challenges, Congress doggedly continued to extend the post, notably in 1825 by authorizing routes to the courthouses of any new county seats, even in remote areas. By 1829, when Andrew Jackson became president, any community of any size—even tiny Chicago, with barely a hundred residents—belonged to America’s information grid. Just as the founders had planned, the states were securely bound by major post routes that intersected with smaller ones to enable countrywide communications, if sometimes still of a poky sort.

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  FOR MILLENNIA, POSTAL SERVICE had been hampered by transportation’s sluggish development, but the latter’s stasis was ended by a major technological breakthrough in the Early Republic. Water was the best way to get around in wild country, but rivers and the sea were also subject to currents, tides, and weather that interfered with postal celerity and reliability. Then, in 1807, Robert Fulton’s steamboat, gloriously impervious to Mother Nature’s variable ways, revolutionized transportation afloat. In 1813, Congress authorized the steamers to carry mail, which they did more speedily than the overland alternatives, and ten years later declared all waterways to be post roads. Some canal boats also received mail contracts, and even steamboats that lacked them accepted mail along their routes. (Such letters were marked “steam” or “steamboat” when the ship’s master delivered them to a post office, where they were assigned the postage due at their places of origin. Through this public-private process, the steamer’s officer got a fee for his trouble, the correspondents got faster service, and the post got full postage while saving on transportation.)